The extraordinary
woman who would come to be known as "the Lady in Blue" was born María Coronel,
on April 2, 1602, in the little town of Agreda in northern Spain. Her initial
years lend credibility to the findings of early childhood researchers who hold
that the "paranormally gifted" child is normal. Her parents, however, from the
time she was two years old, did not consider her at all normal. They, in fact,
found her bewilderingly different from other children in both her mental acuity
and her extreme shyness. Among young children with gifts similar to Mary’s,
often as they grow older their unusual aptitudes become less apparent. But the
remarkable thing about Mary was that as she matured her extrasensory means of
acquiring knowledge continued to develop, and to such a degree as to be
disbelieved.

Only in recent years, as physics and psychology have found
common ground, has there been a basis for understanding the paranormal as an
expansion of human consciousness. Until now, Agreda’s experiences have been
dismissed as "contrary to reason," and therefore as not having happened. Or
where accepted, they have been written off as "supernatural," "miraculous," and
sometimes as "demonic," but in any case as beyond explanation. As a result, the
relevance of her life to the study of extrasensory or paranormal phenomena has
not been given the serious consideration it has deserved.

Times, however, are changing. A new world view—a new concept of
the nature of reality—is turning the conceptual universe inside out. Attention
is now towards the infinitesimal, with one result being the mapping of the
microscopic encoding underlying the manifest world. On this leading edge of the
natural sciences, the division between spirit and matter, energy and form,
realms visible and invisible is being re-conceptualized, with the two now seen
as interpenetrating and even as occupying the same space.

As the "real world" is redefined, the Agreda story at last
begins to make sense!

Over the last century psychology as well has made significant
progress in mapping the inner worlds, levels, or dimensions of human
consciousness. This also has made Agreda’s story remarkably timely.

In this chapter, the child Mary’s earliest years come under
scrutiny for the insight they offer into how paranormal faculties develop in a
child, or conversely, how these same talents can be lost through lack of
encouragement, misunderstanding, and even ridicule.

+ + +

Mary’s parents belonged to the Spanish nobility. Her father,
Francis Coronel, owned the largest castle in the province. Her mother, Catherine
of Arana, who had borne eleven children (seven of whom died in infancy),
confided to her friend, Joseph Ximenez y Samaniego, that she felt her daughter
had been born with a "special blessing." She explained to Father Samaniego, who
would write both her biography and Mary’s, that the birth of this child had been
different from the rest in that she had experienced no pain during labor or
delivery.1

Then on April 11th, when the infant was baptized "María" in the
little church in Agreda, Catherine experienced what she described as an
"extraordinary joy and consolation" as her daughter was dedicated to the service
of God.

When Mary was two years old her mother was astonished by what
she observed to be the child’s ability "to reason." And by the time she was four
her phenomenal memory had become apparent. As her story unfolds, this particular
early indication will help explain one of the most remarkable feats of her later
life.

Also around the time Mary was four, her parents were confronted
with an aspect of her personality they found both baffling and disturbing. She
spoke of entertaining "visitors" and of hearing "voices"—neither of which were
apparent to her parents. And even though Mary tried to explain that the voices
came from God, her parents refused to believe her. As a result the child felt
rejected, and so spoke no more of her visitations. She instead became secretive
and retreated whenever she could to a remote corner of the castle. There, at
least, she could be with her "friends." It was around this time her parents
began to speak of her as "difficult," and that Catherine expressed her
disappointment that her daughter showed no interest in the social activities of
the castle.

Because of her parents’ failure to understand the expanded world
in which she lived, by the time Mary was six she had come to feel utterly
rejected by both her mother and her father. To compensate she took further
consolation in the "friends" of her inner world, and retreated even further from
the outer life of the castle. As one misunderstanding led to another, Catherine
concluded she had been too lenient with her precocious daughter and, after
conferring with her husband, decided to put Mary under strict discipline. The
child, however, interpreted her parents’ harshness as their lack of love for
her. This so troubled her that she became ill. Around this time Catherine
confided to an intimate friend that she was coming to think of her daughter as
"a burden."

From Father Samaniego we learn that Mary’s early loneliness
would remain with her throughout her childhood and up to the first year of her
novitiate as a Poor Clare nun in the Order of Saint Francis.

Mary’s plight could have been even worse had the kindly priest,
who was Mary’s friend as well as her mother’s, not persuaded Catherine to spend
more time with her daughter and to act as the young girl’s tutor. He further
affirmed Mary in her mother’s eyes by saying that from her birth he had
considered the child to be a saint.

2

Thus Catherine came to set aside her own expectations for her
daughter, and began to accept Mary’s interests in spiritual matters. As a
result, she invited Mary to accompany her to church. When Mary showed so keen a
delight in this practice, Father Samaniego next encouraged Catherine to permit
Mary to have her own oratory in a remote section of the castle. And so, away
from the social interactions of the castle, this oratory of her own became for
Mary the laboratory of her developing spirituality.

Father Samaniego reported that it was apparent to him, even at
this early age, that Mary had another trait which spiritually-gifted children
often display—a sense of generosity towards others. In Mary this was expressed
through her habit of secretly leaving for the castle servants the choicest bits
of food on her plate. She was, in fact, so loving by nature that the villagers
who worked about the castle grounds were recorded as having said that when she
walked out-of-doors she left a trail of fragrance behind her. Later, this same
concern for others whom she considered less fortunate would reappear as her
desire to "save souls."

+ + +

Like all children of her day and religious upbringing, Mary was
taught about the torments of hell. It grieved her to think that the souls of a
faraway people would be lost because of their lack of opportunity to hear the
Gospel. Mary’s two brothers, who were studying in the nearby Franciscan
monastery, had fired her imagination with stories of the exciting missionary
activities taking place in New Spain. Mary longed to have a part in so great an
endeavor, regardless of the fact that she was a girl born in a era when women
didn’t go to such places. She would gladly, she said, volunteer her own life if
as much as one soul could be saved. So fervent a desire planted in one so young
would take root in her very being. To comprehend this is to understand how
twelve years later she would—in consciousness if not in body—cross thousands of
miles of sea and land in order to minister to countless Native Americans whose
descendants, to this day, revere her memory as their "Lady in Blue."

In the judgment of the late psychiatrist and psychic researcher,
Dr. Nandor Fodor

,3 it was the intensity of Mary’s desire that was
the operative factor of her "historic flights" to the American Southwest.

Naturally strong-willed, by the time Mary was eight years old
she had made up her mind to become a nun. Her parents, however, felt that she
should wait until she was older. Although wait she did, she never faltered from
her goal. In fact, by the time she was twelve she had became so eager to enter a
convent that her parents finally agreed to place her with the Sisters of Teresa
in the Convent of St. Anne in nearby Tarrazona. It was around this time that the
practical-minded Catherine experienced what her daughter had many times before—a
vision. The message the mother received would change the lives of the entire
Coronel family, the little town of Agreda, and even effect the lives of the
peoples of New Spain, all of which will be considered. But first there are
several conclusions to be drawn as to how paranormal gifts can be recognized in
young children, and how they can be developed rather than stifled.

From the experiences of the child María, it would seem that
children who are labeled "different" tend to withdraw from those who
unthinkingly belittle their paranormal experiences or attribute them to "wild
imaginings." Wiser are those who realize that a child may be more closely
connected to the surrounding world than are most adults, and who remain open to
the possibility that some children really may be in communication with
non-ordinary levels of reality.

G. N. M. Tyrell was a physicist, a mathematician, and an expert
in wireless telegraphy who had studied under Marconi. At the time of his death
in 1954, he was president of the Society for Psychic Research in London. After
studying paranormal phenomena for thirty years, he came to the conclusion that
the faculty labeled paranormal was not something in and of itself but an
integral part of the human personality.

4
He also understood the tendency to disbelieve the paranormal as an instinctive
desire for life to be familiar, and for the world to be limited to clear-cut
issues. He saw this as the mind’s defense, and as its rationale for dismissing
as "rubbish" evidence for anything varying from what was revealed through the
five senses. To thus limit reality kept life from becoming overly complex. It
fulfilled the need for certainty. It protected the solid ground of the mind’s
rational, physical world. To contemplate knowable reality as anything more would
be mentally unsettling. It could even be emotionally destabilizing, and to the
degree that a person’s sense of security was anchored to the "certainties" of
the sensorial world.

Young children, however, have not heard of the scientific method
and its requirement that the data of experience must be limited to the five
senses. Initially, all they experience—sensory and extrasensory—is accepted. And
they tend to continue to do so until they meet with criticism or feel ostracized
when they speak of their experiences in other than ordinary, everyday reality.
Thus the shutdown begins. If adults succeed in persuading them to reject what
they have experienced, then their openness to other dimensions of consciousness
may close entirely. But even in the event they don’t come to disbelieve their
experiences, they may decide these are best forgotten. In this case their gifts
may be lost through disuse. In other words, paranormal gifts can be lost if not
used. This might also explain why tribal peoples have greater psychic powers
than the so-called civilized. Who, after all, needs telepathy when telephones
are at hand? And with travel by jet available to the farthest reaches of the
globe, what missionary of today would need to resort to Mary’s non-mechanical
means of travel?

By noting what goes on when very young children are at play,
their interactions with unseen worlds can be observed. My oldest grandchild,
until he was four, had several playmates similar to Mary’s "visitors," and
another grandchild had an "old friend with long arms and short legs" who visited
him repeatedly. He found it puzzling that his mother could never see the "old
man." Parents, then, are wise in encouraging their children to talk about such
experiences, and in taking seriously what children are willing to share about
their supranormal encounters.

Science has been slow in coming to recognize the human faculty
for extrasensory perception as a universal and therefore normal function of
consciousness. Rather than focusing on the miraculous or supernatural, greater
effort now needs to be directed towards discovering the natural laws at work in
extrasensory and paranormal ways of knowing. Favorable for this is the new
paradigm in which the visible world is recognized as a limited, even
infinitesimal, part of a greater reality—one sometimes apparent to children
during those years when their multidimensional awareness is still open.

It should, however, be noted that even if paranormal powers are
an extension of ordinary consciousness they can be used for evil as well as for
good. But when operating through divinely-attuned channels, as in Mary’s case,
they can accomplish astonishing results.

It was Dr. J. B. Rhine who discovered that spiritually-focused
persons tended to be more psychic than others. And according to Arthur Ford,
coauthor with Marguerite Bro of Nothing So Strange

5,
when groups gathered regularly for the purpose of prayer, it was not unusual for
several members to discover within themselves "gifts" they hadn’t know they had.
Nonetheless, it would be misleading to equate spirituality with the paranormal,
or to limit a saint to someone who performed miracles. In the past this tendency
has hindered research directed towards understanding paranormal faculties as
integral to human personality. But even though psychic and spiritual development
are not synonymous, the two often do overlap, most certainly they did in the
life of Agreda whose goal, from the time she was a child, was to seek God’s will
for her life in selfless service to others. And through her seeking to love with
all of her heart, mind, soul and body, she would come to be what Jesuit scholar
Herbert Thurston described as "one of the most surprising mystics of all times."6

Father Samaniego’s sensible attitude of accepting her childhood
gifts as a part of God’s grace and for God’s glory was and still is the wisest
of courses to follow. It was to Mary’s benefit that the priest advised her
parents to accept her talents even though they didn’t understand them.
Unfortunately, not all the religious advisers of her day were so wise. If she
was misunderstood as a child, she was even more misunderstood as an adolescent,
and even persecuted as an adult when she was ordered by her superior to burn all
of her writings, including the diary of her missionary work in America. Later,
in her four-volume work, The Mystical City of God, she would write about
her earlier disappointments:

I should not be astonished to hear myself condemned as
audacious. This condemnation will be more than justified in these our present
times . . . when even prudent and wise persons are disturbed and even troubled
at the least mention of a higher life . . . looking upon visions and
revelations as most suspicious and dangerous paths for the pursuit of
Christian perfection.7

Samaniego wrote that Mary received undeserved reproach for her
spiritual aptitude, and that she was even accused of being "insensible." Yet the
same criticism was leveled at the late Padre Pio whose piety won for his section
of southern Italy a seven million dollar Home for the Relief of Suffering, built
on the mountain side next to the Capuchin Monastery where the friar had lived
and served as priest from 1917 until his death in 1968.

This much-revered and saintly man, as a boy named Francisco, had
a teacher who also mistook his interest in spiritual things for stupidity, and
who concluded he should give up schooling and go to work in the fields. Like the
saintly Mary, Padre Pio also knew when he was eight that he wanted to become a
monk. Fortunately, his father believed in him and migrated to America to work as
a day laborer to pay for the boy’s education. Instead of accepting the teacher’s
judgment of his son, he put the child in the hands of a competent and
understanding instructor, and one of the twentieth century’s spiritual giants
was spared for service to humanity.

8

Gratitude also is due Mary’s understanding priest and biographer
who helped preserve abundant details of her spiritual progress, and who
encouraged her to write down her experiences as well as to give a full account
of her life. Some day the world will be able to read these testimonials with
better comprehension than is possible with our present, limited knowledge of the
soul’s wider world.

Assuredly with Agreda, the explanation of what she was able to
do lies clearly in her willingness to allow her life to unfold from within out.
And it is to this progression we next turn.